Today, we'd like to turn your attention to 3taps, a new startup that makes sifting through classified ads a whole lot easier. 3taps is supporting our fall fundraising campaign with a $3000 matching challenge! That means if you donate now, 3taps will match your donation dollar for dollar — but only for a limited time. Read on to learn how two friends who once worked at the Federal Reserve see the powerful potential of the CC Public Domain Mark and donate today to have your gift automatically doubled!

Say you're looking for a 2002 Saab Viggen—a rare car that could take hours to find if you were to have to comb through every Craigslist, eBay, and Hemmings listing site. A new web service called 3taps, founded by Karen Gifford and Greg Kidd in San Francisco, is making searching for products and services a whole lot easier: it indexes factual data from different sites and neatly spits out relevant search results on their web, iPhone, and iPad interfaces. You can just type "2002 Saab Viggen" into the search box and, within seconds, have a full list of search results from the over 6.7 million posts made each day that the software sorts through.

Gifford and Kidd both worked at the Federal Reserve and later met working at a financial consulting company. When their large, global clients would run up against systems and data incompatibility issues, they recognized that there was a massive amount of financial data out there but no central database. Thinking about the issue of data management sparked many ideas for Gifford and Kidd and eventually led to the idea of 3taps. While searching for a car seems like a completely different function than searching for aggregated financial data, Gifford and Kidd explain that the concept of having snippets of public information easily available is the same. "The idea is to be ubiquitous," Kidd says. "Everyone should have equal access, open access, and clarity about what's out there that is not protected by copyright."

3taps aims to make the data currently kept in silos more accessible by clearly marking it with the public domain mark once it is located. "We're using the CC public domain mark to bring clarity to the idea that facts are in the public domain and not protected by copyright. Equal access to pricing information is a public good. We see the public domain mark as really important in clarifying what information belongs to the public."

That is one of the many reasons 3taps supports CC. They are showing their support with this matching challenge and we are inviting everyone to make the most of 3taps's generosity by donating to CC now to have your gift doubled.

Why 3taps supports CC:

"3taps indexes factual data about items offered for exchange, like price, quantity and item description. Facts like these are important public information that let people find the best deal on the item they want. There has been a lot of confusion about the status of factual data on the Internet, and confusion in this area inhibits innovation. Creative Commons' newly-released Public Domain Mark is an important tool for bringing clarity to this area. It couldn't have come at a better time for those interested in collaboration in the sphere of data."
— Karen Gifford

In other news:

Check out the super-cool science-themed CC shirt now available in the CC store. The world-famous web comic XKCD was gracious enough to let us re-use a variation on a classic cartoon, and it's all yours for $20.

Microsoft has supported us for the past five years and has given again to this year's fundraising campaign, saying the company "is very proud to continue its support of this important organization and the crucial public resource it makes available" and encouraging other technology companies to do the same.

Creative Commons launches Catalyst Grants! Read about our Catalyst Grants initiative (which you can support today!) that will empower educators, researchers, and technologists around the globe, as well as other exciting news developments for Creative Commons in education, science, and art & media. Download and enjoy!

Subscribe to receive our monthly e-news updates and quarterly PDF newsletters by email, and stay on top of the inspiring stories coming out of the Commons.

CEO Joi Ito gives an update on how Creative Commons has hit the ground running in 2010, with big plans for expanding our efforts in education and open educational resources (OER). You’ll also read about new jurisdictions, government adoption of CC licenses, how CC licenses have played a role in the Haiti earthquake relief effort, and more. Happy reading! This quarterly version of the newsletter is in beautifully-designed PDF format (download), designed for your reading pleasure by the CC Philippines team!

Subscribe to receive our monthly e-news updates and quarterly PDF newsletters by email, and stay on top of the inspiring stories coming out of the Commons.

Creative Commons will soon be turning 7 (Help us celebrate!), and we’re in the midst of our 5th annual fundraising campaign, our yearly effort to raise public awareness and support of our mission to promote free and legal sharing of creative works. This newsletter, from September-December 2009, is a testament to how important our work is, and includes all of the highlights from the past couple months, including stories of new jurisdiction launches, a Nobel Prize for work concerning “the Commons,” CC-licensed feature-length films, and much more. This quarterly version of the newsletter is in beautifully-designed PDF format (download), designed for your reading pleasure by the CC Philippines team!

Subscribe to receive our monthly e-news updates and quarterly PDF newsletters by email, and stay on top of the inspiring stories coming out of the Commons.

Grab the very first issue of the CC Asia-Pacific Newsletter, a stunning and informative publication compiled by CC jurisdictions in the region.

From the editors:

[At the “Commons Crossroads” conference in Manila] it was proposed to have a bi-monthly electronic newsletter from which each of us can be informed of CC activities in one another’s jurisdiction. It is also hoped that the newsletter serves as a venue to share experience and to enable collaboration.

Although English isn’t the first language of many Asia-Pacific jurisdictions, the contributors took an extra effort to prepare the newsletter for a global audience. A huge thank you to the writers and to CC Philippines and CC Taiwan for editing this fantastic volume. For more international news, you can always check out our monthly newsletter and of course keep an eye out for the next Asia-Pacific issue.

Check out the latest ccNewsletter, available to download in PDF format for your reading pleasure as you catch up on the latest CC news. It opens with a special update from CEO Joi Ito, and includes CC’s most exciting recent developments in arts & culture, science, education, and internationally. From groundbreaking CC integrations with Google and Wikipedia, to the launch of new open educational resources, to a CC-licensed web series by director Ridley Scott, you can see for yourself how far CC has come just this year.

Many thanks to Tomas Ashe, our 2009 summer Design Intern, for his beautiful design of this month’s newsletter. You can also check out past issues of the newsletter.

Stay in touch with us!Sign up to receive the newsletter via email and subscribe to our events list.

Check out the latest ccNewsletter, available to download in PDF format for your reading pleasure as you catch up on the latest CC news. Note that from here out, the format of our newsletter will be changing slightly. We’ll send brief monthly e-news updates of the latest CC news, and on a quarterly basis, starting in September, we’ll produce a more comprehensive newsletter including a CEO update from Joi Ito, which will also be available in PDF format. We’ve got a lot of exciting things happening all the time, and we want to be sure to bring all of our big news to you in the most convenient way possible!

Spring is a time for new beginnings, and April’s newsletter will catch you up on all of CC’s many exciting new projects in addition to several milestones marking our continued growth and development as a leader of openness in the realms of science, education and culture, as well as internationally. This newsletter is chock full of interesting items, including the launch of CC Zero; updates from several international jurisdictions; GreenXchange, a project of CC, Nike and Best Buy; a new site for OpenEd that will provide valuable resources for the open education movement; and even a CC-licensed animated feature film.

We’re at a very exciting time in the life of CC. We had a great year last year, and as you’ll read in this newsletter, CC is poised for even more growth and success in 2009 — in the realms of education, science, culture, internationally, and more.

February also marks the one-year anniversary since the CC Philippines team first began designing the stunning PDF versions of the newsletter. As always, many thanks to CC Philippines for the lovely work!

Stay in touch with us: sign up to receive the newsletter via email and subscribe to our events list.

December’s newsletter features ccLearn, the education branch of Creative Commons which has grown substantially this year and has a lot of exciting plans lined up for its bright future as a leader in the open education movement. The newsletter also brings to you news highlights from each of CC’s other program areas.

As you’ll see in this newsletter, we have begun experimenting with a new format as a way to bring you the latest CC news in a more manageable way, so check out #10 and see what you think! As always, many thanks to the CC Philippines team for designing the PDF version.

Stay in touch with us: sign up to receive the newsletter via email and subscribe to our newly-formed events list.